Oktoberfest, Year 2

Its Oktoberfest!

The Pacific City Association (PCA) would like to invite you to our 2^nd annual Oktoberfest: Root • Beer • Float. This is a Black Beer and Root Beer Festival, held Saturday, September19th in Pacific City, Oregon. The title is a play on words, as we will have root beer, black beer and the floats are for glass floats. The trophy for the people’s choice is a large glass float and we will raffle off traditional and modern art glass floats to voters at the Festival. This event promotes Pacific City. Money raised is used to buy advertising and marketing materials to promote the businesses of the PCA. A portion of the proceeds will be donated to local charity, Tillamook County Habitat for Humanity.

Our first year hosting this event, we kept it small, five root beers and nine black beers were available for tasting. This year we are able to expand the Black Beer Garden and our only rule: If it’s clear, it ain’t beer!

A souvenir mug, with tickets, is purchased and the tickets are used for 4 oz tastes and 12 oz pours of the Black Beer and Root Beer. We will also be selling event t-shirts.

The Root Beer Kindergarten is a kid friendly part of the celebration. Kids of all ages can test their taster at the Root Beer Tasting Contest, where they try to identify a national brand root beer. The prize for the winner of each heat is a handful of root beer barrel candy.

We will be having live German music and dancing with the High Fives Band from The Dalles, Oregon and Accordionist Lauri Neumann-Grable from Hillsboro, Oregon.

We will be serving German food. Bratwurst and Sauerkraut is the staple of any Oktoberfest.

It all takes place on Pacific Avenue, just West of the 4-way stop in downtown Pacific City, Oregon.

Please contact me at The Craftsman B&B. 503-965-4574 or at innkeeper@craftsmanbb.com

Overnight Guest

Pacific City had an unusual overnight guest last night. Here at The Craftsman B&B, our guests were very normal. The unusual guest was the Coast Guard helicopter. Now we see the Coast Guard every day. They fly over, along the beach, fly over the runway in town and about once a week, they land at one end of the airstrip and taxi down to the other end, clearing the debris and sand off the runway. It's gets a little noisy when they do this, but it sounds pretty cool, it is a jet after all.

So yesterday, I hear them land and taxi, but they were here for 15 minutes, a little long. Mike and I went to investigate. The crew was looking at the tail section, and if you know anything about how a helicopter flies, you know that the tail rotor is pretty darn important. So later on in the day, another crew flew in and, I guess picked up the stranded crew. This morning, the crew arrived in style and they have been working on the broken 'copter all morning.

I sure hope they get it fixed soon. It will be a busy weekend, when crazy people come to the beach for the 4th, crazy things happen. The Coast Guard is always at the ready to help. Fisherman in trouble, hikers off the trail, they got us covered and we thank them for it.

So how much do we like the Coast Guard? Here is a part, over the front door, of our mural we painted in the living room.

And now for a close-up.

I'm glad we have a safe place for them to land when, I assume, their dashboard lit up with the warnings. Nothing more embarrassing than rescuers needing rescue. Of course, not as funny as a tow truck getting stuck, and we come to the rescue, but that's another story.

Pilots and airplanes

Pacific City on the Oregon Coast is home of a small air strip.  I wrote about it here.  Well we had a guest of honor here at The Craftsman B&B a few weeks ago.  A couple showed up at the door, I did not hear a car door, my usual alert to a guest arrival.  They got checked in and we found out they flew in for an over night stay.  Nothing out of the ordinary for us, we have had many guests fly in.  After talking for a bit, we discovered our guest is the founder and CEO of Van's Aircraft.

Mike has a friend, Dave who along with his father have been flying radio controlled airplanes and helicopter's for years.  Dave decided to get his pilots licence a few years ago and was talking about building his own airplane.  He wanted to build a Van's Aircraft plane, so Mike knew what his business was about and how popular his planes are for the home builder.

Mike used to race sports cars years ago.  He has met his share of engineers and self taught mechanics through out his racing career.  A few have been adventurous enough to build their own cars and planes.  Living not to far from Lawrence Livermore Labs, there were a lot of engineering and tech geeks all over.  Some of them also flew home built planes around the Bay area.  Mike has several friends who are pilots and knew how to talk the talk with them.  In the case of our guest, Mike was wise to just listen, as this guy knows all there is to know about a successful home built plane.

Based at the Aurora airport in Oregon, Van's has a lot of customers in the area.  One of our locals, who used to own the hardware store in town is building a Van's in his garage.  Pacific City is a good spot for local, Willamette Valley pilots to come for lunch and a day at the beach.  Fat Freddy's is a popular spot for the $100 hamburger.  A mile walk up the beach to the Pelican Pub is another popular spot.  But pilots must obey the bottle to throttle rule.  They must take some beer home with them...

No matter how you get here, we are always happy you found us.  Park your car or tie down you plane, Pacific City is the perfect little beach town to walk around, enjoy the shops and restaurants and most of all relax.